At Odds with Contemporary Art: Harold Rosenberg's Book "Art on the Edge"

Abstract

Recently I reviewed in Leonardo [1] Harold Rosenberg's collection of essays entitled Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture and Politics [2]. There, as an inadvertent insight, I made a fleeting comparison of his book to Art and Alienation [3], a collection of essays by Sir Herbert Read that was published in 1967. It seems appropriate to extend the comparison to Rosenberg's new book Art on the Edge [4]. Read was the leading champion of new developments in the art of his time, although he stressed the formal aspects of painting and sculpture and rejected Expressionism as an 'exasperated humanism'. One essay in particular, 'The Limits of Painting', sums up his disappointment over the then recent movement called Action Painting. Read was dismayed by the tendency of painters to offer only private images, which to him meant that their artistic imagination had become 'almost totally atrophied'. His career ended with this depressing outlook, which he felt with a certain bitterness as a breaking of the promises offered at the beginning of 20th-century art. In Tradition of the New [5], first published in 1959, Rosenberg took Read to task for his lack of critical insights. In the essay 'Revolution and the Concept of Beauty', Rosenberg asked three questions: 'Why is Sir Herbert opposed to a new modernist Academy? Why speak of a decline because of a lack of revolutionary vigor ? Why look back nostalgically to the days of outraged taste?'. He accused Read, for example, of taking Dada art far too seriously, since much of it was intended only for momentary displays to shock the public and for publicity gags in Zurich and Paris. The glory of Dada was that it 'helped revolutionize the sensibilities by which art today is recognized'. This book of Rosenberg's also contained the well-known essay 'American Action Painters', which is a near romantic praise of these artists of 1952, whom he considered the heroes of a new artistic revolution.